10.01.10

As you’ve no doubt read by now, LeBron James and Maverick Carter have both claimed there’s a racial element in the way backlash over “The Decision” has played out since last June. It’s really not the most insane suggestion ; just last month, ESPN.com’s Vincent Thomas pointed out that Brett Favre’s Q rating hadn’t taken nearly as much of a hit as LeBron’s, and you could certainly argue the public has every right to be equally fed up with the former. Still, the Bleacher Report’s Kyle Bunton — perhaps the most thoughtful, incisive commentator on multicultural matters since, well, Steve Lyons, feels compelled to argue, “we are talking about the NBA folks; this isn’t the days of old when people like Martin Luther King Jr. were trying to make racism a non-issue in America.”

When Cleveland Cavalier fans were burning his jersey, it wasn’t because he was African American, it was because they felt he betrayed them as a basketball player. If all this was because of race, people would have been making Lebron dolls and lynching them around Cleveland. As Americans, we do have a sense of tribalism, where we support our own race before other races. It doesn’t mean we hate another race, it just means our race is our comfort zone and its hard to get out of a comfort zone. Look at it this way, it is like a Caucasian driving through the ghetto four deep with a tail light out, or an African American pulling up to a country club with “bumpin” and having spinning rims. Those are not situations we are comfortable with, so we stay in our comfort zones.

We don’t care that you are African American or Caucasian, we don’t like you because of what you did and how you did it, don’t make excuses because you can’t handle the criticism now, just like you couldn’t handle the criticism in Cleveland. He thought it was bad in Cleveland, imagine if he doesn’t produce the 5,6,7 titles he says they will win. The worse is yet to come Lebron, hope you are prepared.

5 Responses to “Of Race, Reason And The Bleacher Report”

Bleacher Report is just the worst of the worst. Their weirdly dominant position on Google is a testament to SEO efficacy, but it’s astonishing — given how many aspiring MMA columnists and bush league Gregg Doyels they’ve got on their endless virtual masthead — that I have never read even one good thing at that site. I have to assume they’re making some money, or something, but I want to believe in a world where there are credibility consequences for just running any un-edited bit of bro-birthed idiocy out there. I guess if the SEO stays good, they’ll stay on top. But while this is pretty terrible, it’s probably way closer to the median there than we’d like to think.

Only the Bleacher Report could reduce MLK’s life’s work to “making racism a non-issue”. That there’s a world of difference between that and actually eliminating racism is a subtlety I don’t believe the author has grasped.

hey, when someone actually does “make racism a non-issue”, does that mean the likes of LeBron can stop being accused of “playing the race card” when they’re actually pointing examples, of, y’know, racism?

Is it just me, or has the Obama Era inspired more people than ever to pipe up about bigotry? It’s like one buffoon after the next decides to “tell it like it is,” and just reveal themselves as a mo-ron.

It’s not you, Ben. Not since the Clinton years have I seen so many idiots — on TV and, like, in my office — start sentences with “I know this isn’t politically correct, but…” and then pop off with some hugely retrograde, super-bigoted shit that could never have been correct, politically or otherwise. White people, man.